Greetings and Happy Midweek!
I hope your week is going along smoothly. Thanks for stopping by to reflect a few minutes with me on yet another facet of cross-cultural, and again this week - crosslinguistic - dynamics! In keeping with our June theme of language differences and also with Global SKILLs PROfile domain*, I thought we’d explore this week how the way we speak helps others identify where we are from...maybe!
When I started working in Africa (40 years ago!), I spent extended periods of time in two West African francophone countries, first Côte d’Ivoire (RCI) and then Senegal. After being in Senegal for just a few months, one day a Senegalese acquaintance with whom I was speaking French was rather confused, and said to me that is seemed to him like I was from RCI, based on my French, but I was clearly not Ivoirian! I explained that I had just spent 2 years in RCI, and agreed that my French had in that time taken on quite a few Ivoirian French variations (pronunciation, some different ways of using adjectives, and a few intonation patterns).
Now, after so many years working in Senegal and to avoid similar confusion when I am meeting and speaking with anyone in French, I quickly explain my Senegalese French origins! And I am always fascinated to hear other peoples’ language origins as well. I think it’s a great way to appreciate and value someone’s origin story, and it’s also very much a part of what makes our vastly diverse global community so interesting!
How about you ~ where are you from, and how does that reflect in the language(s) you use?
Share about that with a friend or note it here.
And check out Global SKILLs LINKs below for some additional insights into language variations across regions.
Until next week,
Betsy
* Global SKILLs PROACTive Strategies include PROfile, PROcess and PROgrams
Global SKILLs LINKs
A deeper dive into West African French (this is just the abstract but the link gives an option to download the PDF if you’d like to read the whole article): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249930170_French_in_West_Africa_A_sociolinguistic_perspective
Similar considerations for Spanish (although I would not necessarily agree with how this author defines dialect though...that’s another whole conversations we can have sometime!): https://www.altalang.com/beyond-words/10-spanish-dialects-how-spanish-is-spoken-around-the-world/
And look at India for example...https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hindi-language
2021 ~ Celebrating 40 years of working in
intercultural communications and global community building
Connecting, Collaborating, Cultivating Community